Facebook's New Mission Statement

On Thursday at Facebook’s first Community Summit, a gathering in Chicago of leaders from 120 different Facebook Groups, Mark Zuckerberg unveiled Facebook’s new purpose: “Give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together.”

Facebook’s new mission, Zuckerberg said in an interview at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters last week, doesn’t mean that the company is shifting away from connecting friends and family, but rather, that it’s broadening its focus to enabling people to connect with meaningful communities, too.

Daily Mirror

“For 10 years, we focused on doing everything around connecting people with their friends and family and helping them stay connected,” Zuckerberg said. “Now I think that there is a whole lot of similar work to be done around communities: Meeting new people, getting exposed to new perspectives, making it so that the communities that you join online can translate to the physical world too.”

Zuckerberg described the new mission as an extension of Facebook’s previous one ("Making the world more open and connected”), as opposed to an entirely new direction. The new mission is intended to reflect that Facebook’s responsibility has “expanded,” Zuckerberg said.

“We’ve been thinking about what our responsibility is in the world,” Zuckerberg said. “Connecting friends and family, which have been the primary things we’ve done, have been pretty positive forces in the world, but I think there is just this collective feeling that we have a responsibility to do more than that, not just connect friends and family, but also help build communities and help people get exposed to new perspectives and meet new people, not just give people a voice to get a diversity of opinions out there, but also help build common ground, so people can actually move forward together.”

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